Jewish History by S. M. Dubnow (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📖

enkindled passionate “longing for Zion” in the heart of the forlorn, homeless martyr. He was seized by torturing thirst for political resurrection. Such melancholy feelings and vehement outbursts found expression in the practical Kabbala, originating with Ari (Isaac Luria) and his famous Safed school. A mystical belief in the coming of Messiah thenceforward became one of the essential elements of the Jewish spirit. It vanquished the heart of the learned Joseph Karo, who had brought Rabbinism to its climax by the compilation of his celebrated ritual code, the Shulchan Aruch. With equal force it dominated the being of Solomon Molcho, the enthusiastic youth who, at one time a Marrano, on his public return to Judaism proclaimed the speedy regeneration of Israel. He sealed his faith in his prophecy with death at the stake (1532). The Marranos beyond the Pyrenees and the unfortunate Jews of Italy, who, in the second half of the sixteenth century had to bear the brunt of papal fanaticism, on the increase since the Reformation, were kept in a state of constant excitement by this Messianic doctrine, with its obscure stirrings of hope. A mournful national feeling pervades the Jewish literature of the time. Recollections of torments endured enflamed all hearts. A series of chronicles were thus produced that record the centuries of Jewish martyrdom—_Jocha-sin, Shebet Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha_, etc.

The art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of spiritual union. The papal index librorum prohibitorum was impotent in the face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and feeling carried on by the printing press.

 

After Palestine and Turkey, Holland for a time became the spiritual centre of the scattered Jews (in the seventeenth century). Holland was warmly attached to the cause of liberty. When it succeeded in freeing itself from the clutches of fanatical Spain and her rapacious king, Philip II, it inaugurated the golden era of liberty of conscience, of peaceful development in culture and industry, and granted an asylum to the persecuted and abandoned of all countries. By the thousands the harassed Ghetto sons, especially the Marranos from Spain and Portugal, migrated to Holland. Amsterdam became a second Cordova. The intellectual life was quickened. Freedom from restraint tended to break down the national exclusivism of the Jew, and intercourse with his liberal surroundings varied his mental pursuits. Rabbinism, the Kabbala, philosophy, national poetry—they all had their prominent representatives in Holland. These manifold tendencies were united in the literary activity of Manasseh ben Israel, a scholar of extensive, though not intensive, encyclopedic attainments. Free thought and religious rationalism were embodied in Uriel Acosta. To a still higher degree they were illustrated in the theory of life expounded by the immortal author of the “Theologico-Political Tractate” (1640-1677).

This advanced state of culture in Holland did not fail to react upon the neighboring countries. Under the impulse of enthusiasm for the Bible Puritan England under Cromwell opened its portals to the Jews.

In Italy, in the dank atmosphere of rabbinical dialectics and morbid mysticism, great figures loom up—Leon de Modena, the antagonist of Rabbinism and of the Kabbala, and Joseph del Medigo, mathematician, philosopher, and mystic, the disciple of Galileo.

 

These purple patches were nothing more than the accidents of a transition period. The people as a whole was on the decline. The Jewish mind darted hither and thither, like a startled bird seeking its nest. Holland or Turkey was an inadequate substitute for Spain, if only for the reason that but a tiny fraction of the Jews had found shelter in either. The Jewish national centre must perforce coincide with the numerical centre of the dispersed people, in which, moreover, conditions must grant Jews the possibility of living undisturbed in closely compacted masses, and of perfecting a well-knit organization of social and individual life. Outside of Spain these conditions were fulfilled only by Poland, which gradually, beginning with the sixteenth century, assumed the hegemony over the Jewry of the world.

This marks the displacement of the Sephardic (Spanish, in a broader sense, Romanic) element, and the supremacy of the Ashkenazic (German-Polish) element.

 

Poland had been a resort for Jewish immigrants from Germany since the outbreak of the Crusades, until, in the sixteenth century, it rose to the position of a Jewish centre of the first magnitude. As the merchant middle class, the Jews were protected and advanced by the kings and the Szlachta. The consequent security of their position induced so rapid a growth of the Jewish element that in a little while the Jews of Poland outnumbered those of the old Jewish settlements in Occidental Europe. The numerous privileges granted the Jews, by Boleslaus of Kalish (1246), Kasimir the Great (1347-1370), Witowt (1388), Kasimir IV (1447), and some of their successors, fortified their position in the extended territory covered by Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. Their peculiar circumstances in Poland left an impress upon their inner life. An intense mental activity was called forth. This activity can be traced back to German beginnings, though at the same time it is made up of many original elements. For a space Rabbinism monopolized the intellectual endeavors of the Polish Jews.

The rabbi of Cracow, Moses Isserles, and the rabbi of Ostrog, Solomon Luria (d. 1572), disputed first place with the foremost rabbinical authorities of other countries. Their decisions and circular letters regarding religious and legal questions were accorded binding force.

Associates and successors of theirs founded Talmud academies throughout the country, and large numbers of students attended them.

Commentators upon the Talmud and expounders of classical works in Jewish theological literature appeared in shoals. Jewish printing establishments in Cracow and Lublin were assiduous in turning out a mass of writings, which spread the fame of the Polish rabbis to the remotest communities. The large autonomy enjoyed by the Polish and Lithuanian Jews conferred executive power upon rabbinical legislation.

The Kahal, or Jewish communal government, to a certain degree invested with judicial and administrative competence, could not do without the guiding hand of the rabbis as interpreters of the law. The guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a “college of judges,” with fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their own members. The organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the “Synods of the Four Countries,” formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the system of Talmud academies (_Yeshiboth_) that covered the whole of Poland remind one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the Babylonia of the Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the “golden age,” did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the Orient at Saadia’s time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides.

Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised between the classes of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness that gave peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew as an individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the same exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a sharply defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting violent shocks and beyond the danger point of extinction through foreign invasion.

 

The fateful year 1648 formed a turning point in the history of the Polish Jews, as in the history of the countries belonging to the Polish crown. The Cossack butcheries and wars of extermination of 1648-1658 were the same for the Polish Jews that the Crusades, the Black Death, and all the other occasions for carnage had been for the Jews of Western Europe. It seemed as though history desired to avoid the reproach of partiality, and hastened to mete out even-handed justice by apportioning the same measure of woe to the Jews of Poland as to the Jews of Western Europe. But the Polish Jews were prepared to accept the questionable gift from the hands of history. They had mounted that eminence of spiritual stability on which suffering loses the power to weaken its victim, but, on the contrary, endues him with strength. More than ever they shrank into their shell. They shut themselves up more completely in their inner world, and became morally dulled against the persecutions, the bitter humiliations, the deep scorn, which their surroundings visited upon them. The Polish Jew gradually accustomed himself to his pitiable condition. He hardly knew that life might be other than it was. That the Polish lord to whom he was a means of entertainment might treat him with a trace of respect, or that his neighbors, the middle class merchant, the German guild member, and the Little Russian peasant, might cherish kindly feelings toward him, he could not conceive as a possibility. Seeing himself surrounded by enemies, he took precautions to fortify his camp, not so much to protect himself against hostile assaults from without—they were inevitable—as to paralyze the disastrous consequences of such assaults in his inner world. To compass this end he brought into play all the means suggested by his exceptional position before the law and by his own peculiar social constitution. The Kahal, the autonomous rabbinical administration of communal affairs, more and more assumed the character of an inner dictatorship. Jewish society was persistently kept under the discipline of rigid principles. In many affairs the synagogue attained the position of a court of final appeal. The people were united, or rather packed, into a solid mass by purely mechanical processes—by pressure from without, and by drawing tight a noose from within. Besides this social factor tending to consolidate the Jewish people into a separate union, an intellectual lever was applied to produce the same result. Rabbinism employed the mystical as its adjutant. The one exercised control over all minds, the other over all hearts. The growth of mysticism was fostered both by the unfortunate conditions under which the Polish Jews endured existence and by the Messianic movements which made their appearance among the Jews of other countries.

 

In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the “practical Kabbala.” The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi. As by magic he attracted to himself a tremendous company of adherents in the East and in the West. For a quarter of a century (1650-1676), he kept the Jewish communities everywhere in a state of quivering suspense.

 

The harassed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated its agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly. Not even the apostasy and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his followers. Under the guise of a symbolic faith in a Messiah, many of them, publicly or secretly, continued the propaganda for his doctrines.

 

This propaganda prepared the fertile soil from which, in the eighteenth century, shot up Messianic systems, tending to split Judaism into sects. Nowhere did the mystical teachings evoke so ready a response as in Poland, the very centre of Judaism. At first an ally of the rabbinical school, mysticism grown passionate and uncontrollable now and again acted as the violent opponent of Rabbinism. Secret devotion to the Sabbatian doctrines, which had made their home in Poland, sometimes led to such extremes in dogma and ethics that the rabbis could not contain themselves. Chayyim Malach, Judah Chassid, and other Galician mystics, in the second decade of the eighteenth century brought down upon themselves a rabbinical decree of excommunication. The mystical tendency